22 September 2004: Striking Gould

I've been thinking a lot about Autism lately. Autism in general, and my own in particular. I've become active in a couple of online Asperger Syndrome communities, and in my Interpersonal Communications class my big project for the semester involves an examination of the way that Asperger Syndrome affects my interpersonal communications. I've been learning, observing, mutating, planning. I won't have time to write many journal entries about it this semester, but sometime in the future I'll be constructing a new section of this website dedicated to Autism (both my own writings about it, and links to other sites by and for Autistics).

This Sunday and Monday just past were the first two sessions of the "Song as Vehicle" lab. Third session this coming Sunday. By the fourth session, this coming Monday, each participant in the lab will (we hope) have selected and begun to learn the song that he or she will be working with for the remainder of the lab. Here's what Sherpa says about selecting the song:

The solo song is to be selected from the cultural wellspring of your own genetic ancestry in any one of four timelines: 1) ancient (& shamanic) 2) folk 3) classical or 4) contemporary. Solo songs can be wordless, nemonic (made up words) or with lyrics.

The solo song will be practiced throughout each lab session's warm-up cycles, the polarizations, movement vocabulary work, and the group rituals (as outlined in the paratheatrical orientation). Due to this thoroughness of approach, the solo song should be selected with great care, passion and commitment, much as one might enter the courtship of a prospective lover.

 

I had my song all picked out weeks ago. A Hebrew lullaby called "Laila Laila." (Yes, Lila, it's pronounced the same as your name - I'm sure you'll be pleased to know that in Hebrew, your name means "Night"). I'd begun the process of learning the words (phonetically - I don't speak Hebrew).

But a few days before the first session, I began having second thoughts about my song. I knew that it had some ancestral resonance for me, and I knew that I could learn to sing it, and that I could work with it and find power in it. But I wasn't excited about it - not about the song, not about the prospect of tapping into the wellspring of my Jewish ancestry, and not about the lab itself.

Part of the problem was that I didn't feel like it was going to take me any deeper than I'd already been in my previous paratheatrical work. And I was fairly sure that that would be the case with any old Jewish song I might find. I don't speak Hebrew, but I speak Kabbalah - I'm already well-acquainted with the sacred resonances that underlie Hebrew. Delving into my Jewish roots felt like a step backward for me. Been there, done that, heard the Word, got the number tattooed on my arm.

Sometime Friday, while working on the Asperger-related project for my Interpersonal Communication class, it struck me that when I think of my identity in terms of genetics, I don’t identify primarily as a Jew - I identify as an Autistic.

Autism is as much part of my genetic code as my Jewish ethnicity is. And it’s a much more central part of my life, my identity, my personality, my perspective, my spirituality. The psychological differences between any two ethnic cultures are negligible compared to the psychological differences between an Autistic and a neurotypical. And what I’ve recognized in the past few weeks, as I’ve explored my Autistic identity by becoming more involved in the Autistic community, is that the only resonance that my identity as a Jew ever really held for me was that the alienation and persecution of the Jews was meaningful to me because it served as a metaphor for the alienation and persecution I’ve experienced as an Autistic.

I wouldn’t feel much more at home in a community of neurotypical Jews than I do among any group of neurotypicals. But among Cognitive Mutants - like Moly, like Finder and Stray, and like the many Autistics I’ve begun communing with online – I get the deep sense that these are my people.

On Saturday, the day before the first lab session, the eleven lab participants (four men, including me, Sherpa, and Salamander; seven women, including Syrinx) gathered at Sherpa and Syrinx’s house for a preliminary meeting – our first time meeting as a group.

By this time, my thoughts on the matter of the song were something like this: exploring my genetic heritage as an Autistic is much more interesting to me than exploring my genetic heritage as a Jew. I sense enormous untapped power and magic there. But alas, I don’t see a way to explore it in this lab. A song from the cultural wellspring of Judaism? Easy to find. A song from the cultural wellspring of Autism? Um… nope, can’t think of any. So I guess I’ll just stick with the Jewish thing for this lab, and explore the Autism some other time, even though I feel deeply unsatisfied with the whole thing.

At the meeting, we all shared something about the song we’d chosen. Describing mine made me even more unsatisfied with it, because I was able to talk about it so clearly and confidently, and the others all seemed to understand my choice and to be favorably impressed by my thinking on the matter. Most people in my position would probably have taken this as a good sign. But not me. To me, it was a sign that I was working well within my comfort zone… and I don’t do this work to wallow around in my comfort zone; I can do that by staying home and re-reading old comic books.

Sherpa gave us more details about the work we’d be doing. He said that we’d be primarily focused not on the words of the songs, but on the melodies. The songs we picked didn’t even have to have lyrics. They could just be wordless melodies.

That’s when it clicked for me: Glenn Gould.

Glenn Gould was Autistic. Asperger Syndrome, just like me. And although he’s mostly remembered for his renditions of Bach and other classical composers, Glenn Gould was also a composer himself. Most of the music he wrote never got played – he just wrote sheet after sheet of it and stuffed it into plastic garbage bags which piled up in his house. But some of it was recorded.

Which meant that I could walk into a local record store with a good classical section, and buy a CD containing melodies written by a fellow Autistic. And since Gould’s musical talent had a distinct Autistic-savant quality to it, his melodies could definitely be said to come from the “genetic wellspring” of Autism.

So now I’ve got my song. A Glenn Gould solo piano piece only a minute long, an extremely simple melody that repeats over and over again with a sort of idiot playfulness. Just listening to it makes me rock back and forth with little Autistic micromovements.

Very excited about this lab.